They are legendary in speech and image: Marcel Duchamp’s disguises and countless photographic self-stagings, his ironic, sarcastic, humorous comments on art, the art industry, art criticism and art history. Less well known is a Marcel Duchamp who, with great empathy and strategic awareness, embraced the cause of the artists in his contemporary cultural environment: as curator of exhibitions from the early 1910s to his death in 1968, as juror and as consultant for some of the most important collections, museums and galleries of modern art.
The volume outlines nearly forty exhibitions, supplemented by recent research results, and illustrates Duchamp’s close cooperation with protagonists of his time: Louise and Walter Conrad Arensberg, Katherine S. Dreier, Francis Picabia, Sidney and Harriet Janis as well as André Breton, Julien Levy, or Peggy Guggenheim.